Tolkien Gateway's official chat server is located at irc.tolkiengateway.net port: 6667 for IRC clients and averages 3-5 users in the main lobby. If you have no idea what that says, then you probably want to use the browser-based client, Mibbit:

Former

IRC Clients

X-Chat

X-Chat is an open source IRC client for Linux, Windows and Mac based operating systems. X-Chat can be scripted with plug-ins in a number of programming languages: Perl, Python, Tcl, and Ruby, which are available as external plugins and contain a binary module interface, usually for the C programming language.

On Linux

X-Chat is avaible through the package managers of most distributions. On Debian-based systems, such as Ubuntu, simply type sudo apt-get install xchat in a terminal.